Self-development Strategies

Throughout your career or personal life, you are guaranteed to face a variety of situations, changing environments, and new roles that require you to adapt to them. A self-development plan will help you to deal with the changes and challenges, for which you need to be well-equipped to excel in all the areas in your life.

When it comes to personal development, it can be stated that it is an ongoing process of self-development either in your career, in your education, in your personal life, or in all these areas. It is about setting goals for yourself and putting plans in place to reach those goals.

Here we are sharing a few self-development strategies that can help you be well-equipped to excel in all areas of your life.

1.    Step out of your comfort zone

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.” — Brian Tracy

When you take responsibility for your life, unexpected events unfold and lead you to awaken your inherent wisdom. At this level, you must be willing to step out of your comfort zone and meet life with passion and commitment.

In life you may be feeling uninspired — emotionally drained and lacking direction. Don’t despair since you may simply be experiencing an internal shift. For your career growth, it is very essential to step out of your comfort zone.

From time to time, you need to challenge and become a better version of yourself. If there are areas of your job that you do not like or are not good at, those are the weaknesses that a personal development plan can help you improve on. Confronting these areas and improving them can help to push you out of your comfort zone. This allows you to experience growth and to improve your skills.

2.    Establishing the goals

To achieve a goal, you need a plan which can be a subpart of various goal-oriented action items. Amazingly hit ideas fail, because of poor goal setting and planning. No one knows you better than yourself.

While setting your goal, consider the top 5 important principles – commitment, clarity, challenging, task complexity and feedback. Hence you will have to set the goals for yourself and create a plan of action to achieve them.

Interestingly setting goals and reflecting upon them improves the overall success ratio. An optimistic approach to goal setting can aid success.

3.    Nurturing your strengths

It is often considered that in order to succeed, you must overcome your weaknesses. As a result, many people have dedicated their energy to follow this recommendation. By no means, it is about not focusing on your non-strengths.

Each one of you possesses different strengths and unique abilities that need nurturing. And by nurturing your strengths the results can be more rewarding.

An easy way to identify your strengths are:

Step 1: Think of a specific moment when you achieved a success in which you felt deeply engaged and fulfilled.

Step 2: While reflecting on this moment, list specific adjectives to describe the talents and/or character traits you applied.

Step 3: Review your list and choose your top five personal strengths.

4.    Developing the weaknesses

Everyone has their weaknesses, even the biggest CEO’s in the world, and acknowledging these weaknesses and rectifying them is the real key to success.

Easy way to identify your weakness are –

• Think about your career goal

The first thing to do is to think about what skills you need for the career you are aspiring for. Do some research into your career and what skills you need to develop.

• Be honest with yourself

Once you know about your career path and what kind of skills you need, take a good look at yourself and analyze where you are lacking. Be honest about yourself. You know yourself better than the others. Think and evaluate the feedback that you’ve received and how you work towards improving it.

• Get guidance from someone you trust

Find a mentor for yourself who can be your critique. Learn from your experiences and go for advice to people whom you really trust will be honest with you, and not someone who is just going to false praise you.  It is also important to know when you need guidance and asking for it.

5.    Evaluate your outcomes

Evaluating your outcomes gives you the opportunity to take an honest look at the areas that need improvement. Through this process, you will improve your self-awareness and experience fulfillment.

Once you have achieved a certain goal, gained another skill, or developed a certain area of your life, you naturally feel good about yourself. The more you keep on developing in the areas of your life you are not confident in, the more you can boost your confidence.